Clean Your Website, Care for Your Visitors

Clean Your Website, Care for Your Visitors

Spend only a few minutes on a cluttered, design-disaster homepage, and you’ll quickly be running away! Today, customers want to visit websites that are clean, well-organized, focused, and, honestly, pleasing to the eye. Your website’s design says a lot about your business and brand, as we discussed in our “Killer Homepage”blog post. Just like you wouldn’t let your physical store fall into disrepair, you shouldn’t allow your site to become cluttered, confusing, or out-of-date.

Whether your business’s website is older or under-performing, or you are just looking for a quick refresh, here are some tips to keep in mind to make your website better and your customers happier.

Avoid clutter and content overload. If your website is packed with text, images, video, banners, and more—where is your customer supposed to look first? Having an overly cluttered website will lead to a high bounce rate, a lower rate of returning visitors and, subsequently, fewer conversions. Good editing is key here, so think about: What are the most important text and images your customer needs to see, with the least amount of disorganization? Trim away the excess, because it’s not helping your pages, but rather blocking your customer from easily finding what they need!

Use a readable font and font size. Better yet, use one that is easily scalable for low-vision visitors. For headlines, try out fonts such as Montserrat or Apercu, and for body content, Roboto or Avenir. Also, keep in mind color and contrast. Readability is paramount, and visitors should be able to read your content without straining their eyes. There are color contrast tools out there that can check whether the contrast on a website conforms to accepted standards. You can add an extension to your Google Chrome browser or try this easy to use analyzer. Using color here and there is great, but keep your design and colors professional and clean (no rainbows!).

Break up long paragraphs with photos or bullet points. Users need information in a concise and easy to skim style. This doesn’t mean changing your great, optimized content. But what we are saying is to simply focus on delivering content to your visitors in a quicker, cleaner manner. Using bullet points and photos allow a visitor to focus on the key points you are trying to make without overwhelming them with a large chunks of text.

Bold only key ideas in the text. If you add too much bold, it loses its impact! Avoid over-emphasizing the whole page, which is counterproductive, and instead only bold what is really important to your users. Again, they are quickly reading your content and looking for key messages, so make it easier for them by highlighting these.

Include a few hyperlinked keywords. Simple hyperlinked (make them blue to stand out even more!) keywords in a paragraph can be an easy call to action that encourages visits to interior pages and view your inventory or services. This is helpful for navigation and engagement, but don’t overdo it or the text will become difficult to read.

Remember to stay current and seasonal. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: It’s best for your business to keep your site up-to-date with your physical store’s inventory, offers, and events. Staying relevant and current on your website is one more way you can make your customer’s experience as excellent as possible.

There’s nothing like a good spring clean of your dealership, so give your online presence the same attention! Now that you’ve got some guidelines for making your website look its best, focus on renovating your content and designs to better serve your visitors. Need some more tips on cleaning up your website? Reach out to us in the comments section below!